Maureen, Maureen, I'm beggin' of you, please don't take my band

She's the one at the back. Yeah, that you can barely see.

After hearing the apparently world-shattering news that Maureen Ann “Moe” Tucker was a signed-up member of the Tea Party we’ve seen a hell of a lot of commentary on the issue. There’s those who are now totally distraught over the loss of one of their idols by political association to a “movement” that’s well documented for its anti-masturbation, witchcrafting, “I’d give Anne Frank up to the Nazis ‘cause lying is a sin", socialism-is-commu-facism gestalt. Then there’s Alexis Petridis’ pseudo-formalist riposte of “separate the art from the artist”.

And, as Petridis points out, this isn’t exactly unexpected. Rightly or wrongly, there’s outcry whenever a previously radical figure suddenly appears head in The Man’s lap, throat-deep on his profit margin. Whether they’re voting for George W. Bush (yes, we’re looking at you Tom Wolfe), or gadding around LA with their puppet-self in a roofless car insured by Swiftcover, there’s a sense of betrayal— that their idols have gone against, maybe even reversed, those anti-conformist freedoms they typified, restructuring the staid taboos and rigidities that they uprooted as often as their genital appendages (we do wonder what Iggy’s puppet penis is like b/t/w).

Now, that a woman named Maureen is the latest subject at the epicentre of this cultural conjuncture should be restated. We’ve got a neighbour named Maureen; she’s a lovely old lady who we’d suspect never spent days on end stratospherically-high on LSD playing second-sexual-fiddle to Nico in one of the most celebrated rock bands of the last century. She’s kind and always asks us how we’re doing. Her husband’s a decent guy. We don’t think she likes the Tea Party. But you never know.

A true tea party.

The point being that Maureen [Tucker, not our neighbour] is a metaphor for what’s going on with this debate and kind of reveals why the thing seems never-ending. Just as no one named Maureen could be a far-out radical, the sixties and seventies rebellion of identity politics and it’s aestheticisation in popular music was never, actually, as anti-establishment as is generally thought.

Adam Curtis has been making this point for years in so far as the central tenant of individual liberty that the hopeful 68ers so readily took up and perpetuated in the name of worthy political causes was co-opted by some more active malevolent business types to leave us with self-obsessed, consuming, fearful Nixon-like societies. [Here he is making a side-line into this debate on the topic of Mad Men.]

For the theory buffs out there, the names Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and so on should ring a bell as these guys have been arguing for this way better than we ever could and concerning far more ubiquitous shit than Adam Curtis. But let’s not tumble into that whole area and let’s get back to Maureen.

To remind ourselves of just how good The Velvet Underground were, we went to listen to some CDs we found back in our old rooms (from a time before we became pirates). We listened to White Light/ White Heat and remembered that it’s actually pretty awesome—the muffled production’s pretty charming and it has a lot of the repetitive swirling melodies that they’re famous for yet they’re far more docile than is the case elsewhere which then work into the noisy finale of ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ and ‘Sister Ray’.

BUT, after that we discovered that the & Nico disc was missing. We hate that. Why not put it back in its box? It’s not hard is it? For fuck’s sake, some people have no respect for our personal, private property! Fucking hippies.

IRONY or PSYCHOPATH: 1, David Starkey

Bizarre Saturday Times this week. We know this only because we’ve gone home and Daddy reads the Times. I mean, of course Daddy reads the Times. As Jim Hacker puts it in an episode of Yes, Minister I can’t be bothered to specifically identify:

The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; The Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

And the Marilyn’s Daddy runs the country.

First of all, there was the front page of the Review, completely taken up by a feature called ‘The books you must read before you’re 21.’ So far, so unimaginative: Erica Wagner couldn’t even be arsed to make it, I don’t know, ‘21 books you must read before you’re 21’ or something at least semi-symmetrical like that. And so far, so fucking irritating. Because these lists always involve aged writers telling an imagined (and, indeed, this being the Saturday Times, also entirely imaginary) kiddie audience that they simply must read a certain book before they pass a no-longer-even-legally-entrenched arbitrary milestone, even though they didn’t actually do so themselves. Presumably because (bearing in mind this list contains contributions by Callow and Rushdie) they were chasing cock or snatch, as one does at the age of <21.

I discovered Auden at the age of 25...Here was a wonderful humane voice, and I was sorry I had not come to him earlier. Sixteen is the age to begin Auden, in my view, although sometimes it can be before that.

Your view, Alexander, even though you don’t actually know what it’s like to read Auden when you’re sixteen BECAUSE YOU CAME TO HIM WHEN YOU WERE IN YOUR MID-TWENTIES. SO HOW DARE YOU FUCKING PREACH? Parts of Auden are pretty difficult. Yeah, they mostly rhyme, but y’know, one need only glance at, y’know, part two of ONE OF HIS MOST FAMOUS GODDAM POEMS, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats,’ to realise THERE’S PROBABLY SOMETHING HERE FOR YOU EVEN WHEN YOU’RE NOT PUBESCENT:

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

What makes the feature particularly bizarre, though, is that it hinges itself, sexy picture, sexy frontpage advert, all of itself upon a contribution from Nigella goddam Lawson. A piece containing contributions from Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn and its most notable feature is, to Wagner’s mind, Nigella’s prose. Which is, inevitably, a masterful exercise in involuntary self-parody (albeit recommending an excellent book). We’ve bolded the best bits for the win:

Tonio Kröger, by Thomas Mann

It is one of those novels – though strictly speaking, a novella – that is only truly appreciated by the adolescent reader. The intensity of feeling, the overwhelming anguish and unbearable conflict that Tonio Kröger feels, needs to be met with fellow-feeling in the reader. Once you have grown up, I suspect that a lot of the book’s power, even meaning, would be lost. It’s certainly a book that poleaxed me when I read it at 18 etc. etc.

Since Saturday, we have masturbated exactly 14 times over the image of the adolescent Nigella, not yet touched by the hairy Saatchi hand, getting poleaxed. It doesn’t even hurt anymore.

Involuntary self-parody pales into insignificance, though, when placed alongside that dear man David Starkey’s comments in the Times Magazine's ‘What I’ve learnt’ section, which represent an excellent introduction to a new game we’ll be playing over the next few months: IRONY or PSYCHOPATH? The premise is simple: cite a couple of credibly quoted quotations belonging to a famous man or woman that, if not ironic, unquestionably represent the rantings of a fucking madman, and then decide whether they are in fact ironic or not. Over to you sir...

There’s no connection between a Damien Hirst and a Holbein or a Raphael. The only reason modern art exists is to decorate large banks’ foyers. So it was clever of Nicholas Sarota to commission Tate Modern – which looks exactly like a New York bank foyer.

That actually sounds rather reasonable, albeit misguided…

I despair of politicians. I put it down to the disintegration of the governing class. Aristocratic governments tend to be rather impressive. Look at the Roman Republic, or England in the 18th and 19th centuries. Look at Churchill. Democratic politics have occasional wondrous peaks, but most of the time you’ve got John Prescott.

Wait a minute, he didn’t just try to say…did he...

Gays are a bit like Jews. We’re an extraordinarily odd minority that’s had a totally disproportionate effect intellectually and culturally. But now homosexuality has been normalised, and in some ways that’s a tremendous loss.

What. The fuck?

The verdict: IRONY

These comments, although bewilderingly problematic are, we have to admit, rather droll. This, in the same interview, similarly: ‘I’ve been “the rudest man in Britain” ever since my encounter with George Austin, former Archdeacon of York, on the Moral Maze. He did a high-flown rant against Prince Charles, and as he left I said, “Don’t his fatness, his smugness and his pomposity really make you want to vomit?” It’s a great line: two Anglo-Saxon insults followed by a Latin one.’

Psychopaths are seldom droll, therefore we must rule in Starkey’s favour. Jesus what a prick though, right?

We're just saying...

(Thanks to The Guardian and Google Images for the pics)

Pay attention. This is very important.

It may have a great deal to do with the fact that being in public--which by contemporary definition means you're kind of just hanging out with a whole bunch of people about whom you've not got the feintest idea--is fucking weird; maybe it's the recession; or maybe it was that Pirrelli-inspired non-brand vacuum packed salami we ate. But anyway, when on a recent train journey it occured to us that signs are possibly the most perplexing signifiers on earth.

Maybe it's that they're so aware that they're meant to be saying something, whatever it is, and that the people who write them are--to recycle a commonly-held truism--are some of those people who fear public speaking over death itself. If we can put that much faith in this truism then it would go someway to explaining the logic behind the death-public-speaking conundra evident in this sign seen on said train journey:


We don't want to say, like some German guys did from Frankfurt, that this sign is no doubt just the one sole force stopping us all leaping from the train doors, leaning into the whooshing air and wontonly decapitating ourslves on passing trains. We also don't want to get all Daily Mail and shake our fists at our socialisedhomonannystate.

Rather, that signs are weird ---> weird can be pretty funny ---> funny is good ---> we like the internet. Let's bask:

Well said.

Enough said.

No comment.

Ever present dangers.

Serenaders be warned.

Always, always climb on the mutha' fucking rocks.

(Thanks to Nick Holmes and tumblr)

"I am just an unhappy user"

Setting aside the ironies inclusive in any online complaint about the information age, we wanted to address how, despite our own graceful presence online, the internet is more often than not an utter bastard. To wit: one of our friends has a paraplegic laptop that doddles along through its ageing years with the speed, veracity and enthusiasm of a gout-ridden slug.

Despite this it brings them a strange calm, a patience with the world of technological “advancement”. They smugly imagine themselves above those who imagine themselves driving down the straight path to the wonderful world of Snow Leotard OS, OS XXX, or whatever it is. This week we heard a story from them. Maybe it can bring some answers in this sea of information. Here it be, as we can remember it being told (sincere apologies for any misquotations):

‘So, one fine day… who am I kidding? It was muggy, grey, and to be honest full of box-ticking obligatory to-dos. Anyway, on said not-fine day, I was trying to rid my Toshiba of some unneeded programs and what have you, to get my beloved ol’ codger into some sort of fitness. An anti-spyware program that doesn’t even load up due to the now over-aforementioned problems of the computer was the first up against the wall. So, “Uninstall Spybot” I click. “Why?” it asks. This is a bit of weird enquiry. But never mind. I notice, adjacent to this, a suggested reply: “I am just an unhappy user”.

A section comment below allocates the space to air one’s grievances, explain one’s reasons, and maybe, just maybe, point out that it’s not actually me, but in fact it IS you, yes YOU, you ruin my life with your bullshit, I hate you and I want you gone. You — the virus killer — have become the virus in my life, now be gone you about-turning, ironic fuck!

And what’s this: “I am just an unhappy user”? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? How can you blandly suggest such a widely encompassing response, so casually summating the whole essence of my beautiful, magnificent being by virtue of my simple request to ‘Add or Remove Program’ from my personal, not-at-all-parent-bought, laptop computer?

And “just”? I am not just anything. For all you know I could be an Olympic athlete with ADHD! A selfless Wall Street trader who one day offers up his life to save a downtrodden Trotskyite tramp! A totalitarian dictator who knows of course his violent racism is a macabre manifestation of a virulent Oedipus complex., but who, in spite of this, still believes that it IS all the fault of those darned scum with darker dermal pigmentation!

“Unhappy”?

“User”?

Of course I’m unhappy. I know I’m a user. Yes, I’ll “Cancel” the uninstall process. Are you happy now? Remember the breathing technique, you think. Focus on the breath. Breathing is happening. Breathing is happening. You are OK. You are rising above the doldrums of the technological age. You are transcendent. You are at one.’

Welcome Back to The Mansion From The Mansion

Yes, it has been a while. Everyone gets a summer right? What have we been up to? you're no doubt not really asking. Well, as a picture paints a thousand words then here's about 8,000:

So, anyway, we'll be back on your screens in the coming days, as we were all those months ago. We're sorry we were gone. We'll change, change back to the same thing we were. Forward to the past!

Rowdhouse Productions presents 'The Falling Dog'

The Marilyn Mansion Distributions (our newest venture) has teamed up with Rowdhouse Productions to bring you a home movie based upon a Donald Barthelme short story. Made in a gruelling 270 minutes this marks the first of a few upcoming videos to be put out via our Vimeo page (fuck Youtube, OK you get some great treats on there but the adverts popping up all over, the setting that moves you onto the next video without you asking--it's all messed up).

We'll be putting up some productions from the guys and gals at Rowdhouse from previous months and years as well as some projects currently underway. So, tighten your sphincters 'cos here it comes!

[Oh, apologies to anyone with a laptop as slow as one of ours--because Vimeo streams at a high rate it isn't always watchable. If anyone knows whether this is fixable, drop us a message below...]

The Falling Dog from The Marilyn Mansion on Vimeo.